Re: True Love

I've just read Nick's post regarding his disgust at metaphysical understanding of 'true love'. I myself tend to sign up to the physicalist picture of the world, while at the same time trying to avoid any sort of gross or counter-intuitive reductionism. I'd just like to comment a little on what he said:

First, Nick says that the thought that true love exists like some perfect element deserving a place in the periodic table alongside gold, silver and titanium, or perhaps like some ideal chord which sounds deeply in the glens when ?soul mates? fornicate by babbling brooks, seems to me a peculiarly religious concept. I gather that he's disagreeing with the idea that 'true love' is a substance like gold or silver, or an ideal Platonic-type form (the 'ideal chord'). I have to say that I don't think that anyone really thinks that it is. Thinking that 'true love' is a substance isn't even something religious people think, as far as I know, and thinking that it is an ideal form is probably unusual enough too. So there's not really much to worry about here.

Second, he writes that I believe the world contains stuff like rocks and photons, animals and species. The world certainly does contain rocks, photons (or so I'm told by people who know about theses things), animals and species. Now, I'm not sure that having a worldview that includes these things necessarily rules out having a worldview that also includes the concept of 'true love'. At least two of the above listed items can be said to have less than perfectly empirical or physicalist bases; the concept of a 'species', as far as I know, is somewhat vague, and certainly not something that arises self-evidently when one looks at the world scientifically. Photons are, again as far as I know, rather more theoretical (though very well supported) than straightforwardly empirical entities. Now I see no reason to doubt that there are species and photons; my point is only that there may be some difficulty in describing a kind of worldview that allows objects that are, strictly speaking, not determined by physical facts, and that at the same time disallows something like 'true love'. Of course, all of this depends on what 'determined by physical facts' means, and what will be allowed by Nick's worldview will depend to a great extent on what he understands by this relation. The relation might be logical, apriori, supervenience-based, or something weaker.

Finally, Nick says that we can treat the concept of 'true love' as a metaphor used to describe certain emotional states or experiences. Now, there are a number of possibilities here:

First, if he means that true love is an emotional state or experience, and that people who think otherwise are simply misguided, then the world does contain true love, contrary to what was suggested earlier; that is, it contains the emotional state(s) or experience that is called 'true love'.

If he means that we should call certain emotional states or experiences 'true love', then I would suggest that this cannot be right. This would imply (I presume) that 'love' is a metaphorical term for an emotion or experience (if 'true' is taken here to imply something like 'real'). However 'love' seems to have applications beyond reference to the emotions or a set of experiences. It is surely possible to say at time t that X loves Y without implying that he necessarily has some specific emotion or set of experiences at t. And it would seem absurd to say of two people that they were only in love when some emotion was being felt by both of them. X might be in a business meeting, and Y at home cooking the dinner, and it would be true that X loved Y at that time. Now, if 'love' is an emotion or experience (or set of emotions or experiences) then it would have to be a very broad set that could encompass the emotions or experiences that people feel/have at the times that they can (truly, I believe) be said to be in love.

I don't know what 'true love' is, and I am, like Nick, an empiricist of some modern kind; but I would suggest that the rejection of well entrenched, easily applied but somewhat mysterious concepts like that of 'true love' is not an easy task, and requires more than just the adoption of an empiricist worldview. As Nick acknowledges, we cannot reduce human experience and complex human concepts like 'love' to the simple actions of chemicals and DNA, because if we do we are liable to leave things out and make grievous errors. There are many concepts like 'love' or 'true love' that science cannot describe, and I believe that we do not, as philosophers, do ourselves any favours by trying to reduce them to something else or claim that they have no application (or are metaphors).

Thank you for reading.

Nick Tasker <into_thin_air@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear Philosophers,

A Martian observer, if forced to browse a few romantic novels and popular magazines, might conclude that planet earth contains the following items: soul-mates, forgiveness and true love. Since I don?t believe in souls, can?t work out exactly what?s left over in the concept of forgiveness once the purely Christian notions have been subtracted, and literally puke blood at the mention of true love, I think our Martian would have been mislead.

These and other ethereal absolutes are often referred to in our culture and together constitute a highly dubious system of folk-biology/psychology. The thought that true love exists like some perfect element deserving a place in the periodic table alongside gold, silver and titanium, or perhaps like some ideal chord which sounds deeply in the glens when ?soul mates? fornicate by babbling brooks, seems to me a peculiarly religious concept, and yet many of those who use this vocabulary are enlightened, scientifically inclined, and religiously disinclined.

For my own part, I believe the world contains stuff like rocks and photons, animals and species; we?re a bunch of ?little talking creatures upon the planet?s back.? On this particular worldview (which I admit is a matter of personal choice in as much as I think the attractive explanatory package we call natural science requires it) I just don?t see where soul-mates fit in. Plus there are all the old objections to dualism. (Please imagine that these parentheses contain a concise and undeniable exposition of the flaws of dualism. Ahem.) By the way, I?m not exactly of the ?all human emotion is about shagging and DNA replication? school of thought. I recognise that the human mind is a complex and imperfectly adapted thing.

Personally I find this liberating. When I find myself inadequate by these pseudo-spiritual standards, like when I find that loving my girlfriend just doesn?t make daffodils any more beautiful than they were, or when I find that once close friends pass out of my life and cease to be important, then my biological worldview absolves me from any compulsion towards self-flagellation. I do realise that not everybody feels the same way; they find the scientific/animal view too bleak.

Anyhow, what I?d like to suggest is that these mysterious spiritual phrases can function as useful metaphors, and that if we treat them as such then the scientific worldview loses its impersonal (carefully chosen word) edge yet retains its potential for liberation. What I mean is this: I don?t ever expect to meet a soul mate or to be someone?s soul mate; I never expect to feel the vapours of true love pumping through my veins; and yet, generations of people have used these phrases in an attempt to aptly describe their experiences. So?there must be some set of experiences which human beings are capable of undergoing and which in some important sense are analogous to true love etc. The implication is that we can use this mysterious vocabulary ? metaphorically - to describe our lives. The words ?true love? mean approximately those experiences which generations of people were undergoing whenever they used those words. All we need ditch is the metaphysical baggage. After all, the spiritual stuff may only ever have been a theoretical posit designed to explain these remarkable feelings which humans are capable of. The emotions have primacy; they exist before the spiritual inference, and they can exist without that inference. So, yes, we can all demand of our lives that we enjoy true love with our soul mates, if that is what you really want. We can demand of our close friends that our interactions fill us with the emotions which make us want to spout spiritual imagery. Reject anything less. And, of course, these standards apply in both directions: the possibility of enjoying metaphorical true love carries with it the responsibility of engendering it in those whom we encounter in our lives. (By the way, if we are going to talk of true love and soul mates, then why bother hanging on to the antiquated ONE true love, and ONE soul-mate clause. There are millions of souls out there.)

Lastly, thanks to all those who came to the Durham conference; I enjoyed it enormously and met lots of lovely people. I hope you all got home more safely than I did: surviving a meeting with an articulated truck and several barrel rolls down the M25, with no more than a bump on my head, is almost enough to make me believe in guardian angels?

Nick